, Israel
) is an Israel
i-British
physicist
at the University of Oxford
. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation
(CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory
of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing machine
, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer.
Surely it is more interesting to argue about what the truth is, than about what some particular thinker, however great, did or did not think.
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense...
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy—but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation—the only one that is tenable—of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality. (Ch. 2)
Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. (Ch.3)
Think of all our knowledge-generating processes, our whole culture and civilization, and all the thought processes in the minds of every individual, and indeed the entire evolving biosphere as well, as being a gigantic computation. The whole thing is executing a self-motivated, self-generating computer program. More specifically it is, as I have mentioned, a virtual-reality program in the process of rendering, with ever-increasing accuracy, the whole of existence.
It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment. (Ch. 6)
Since building a universal virtual-reality generator is physically possible, it must actually be built in some universes. (Ch. 6)
Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes. (Ch. 9)